There is problem with tick rate. If tick duration is high then the game is very slow. If it is low then one can loose a game during a night’s sleep. So here are some ideas how to solve it:

automatically pause the game during night hours ( a game setting )

bot takes over if player is afk (player setting)

player can set up even more sophisticated rules how to defend systems. Destroy gates automatically if enemy fleet attacks. Enable defense-mode for a carrier and assign systems to defend against attacks to a carrier. If an attack is detected the fleet try to defend those systems.

I’ve been thinking that it would be nice to have some contingency rules in real time games. Even a contingency to email you when a carrier is on it’s way to your star would be helpful. But far better if I can set sophisticated rules. Like: If the ships on planet A fall below x numbers, then launch y+z ships from planet B. Stuff like that. Or even allow you to preset automatic infrastructure buys at production - either across the galaxy on specific to each star.

player can set up even more sophisticated rules how to defend systems. Destroy gates automatically if enemy fleet attacks. Enable defense-mode for a carrier and assign systems to defend against attacks to a carrier. If an attack is detected the fleet try to defend those systems.

Programmable AI that plays for you is a fun idea ! But I wonder how difficult this would be to implement ? Bug testing could be challenging. As it is now, carrier routing, sometimes into repeating loops, is already a simplistic form of programming. There are currently no conditional controls, and not triggers based on Scanning data, or tech levels achieved. This could be a lot of labor.

Long time ago, I played a game called Omega , that allowed me to design a battle tank with optional modules, and write sophisticated code to program its on-board AI combat algorithms. Hard work but great fun !

So, I had this same problem a few weeks/months ago. People wanted to play only during the day and avoid the “middle of the night” sneak attack strategy. Personally, I’m not a fan of the game style, but I can see where people are coming from.

Anyway, I (very quickly so it’s a little hacky) wrote a small program to do this to be able to run a game as people wanted. I set up a cron job on a computer that was always on and ran it twice a day, once to toggle the pause off and once to toggle it on.

None of that is necessary, of course, you (the game administrator) could just go and issue the pause toggle commands yourself, but this program made it a bit easier. I’ve made it available on github if anyone is interested.

I really like the idea of automatic sleep time. However, I feel that especially in turn-based games the more sophisticated rules would take fun out of the game and should therefore be optional (if implemented).

The one problem is that people are in different time zones and there for, even just in the other side of America, two people could be 3 hours apart. That doesn’t even include if they are in different countries. Some one could wake up AS the game pauses and they lost many stars the night before and now they have to wait like 10 hours before they can play agin.

Obviously “sleep timing” could only work on a global clock level. That does mean that you’d have to be aware of or negotiate a satisfactory time to run the game. It’s not a panacea by any means, but it does solve a small problem some people have.

That’s exactly what we did in my game: compromised to 10a-10p and 30 minute ticks. A game day was still 24 hours of clock time, but that was a 12 on/12 off distribution.

People will always be away from the game for some duration, either sleeping or working, so the person who attacks in the middle of your sleep cycle can have the tables turned during their sleep cycle.

I love this aspect of the game. I finish off my day planning for attacks while I’m asleep. As best I can, I make sure that all stars that are reachable by my enemy, while I’m asleep, has a sizable garrison for defense. I set up fall back stars for when I wake to see a sizable invasion is hitting points here I’m least defended, and I keep ships in reserve to counter attacks such as these.

This is all part of the strategy of Triton, and what makes it so much fun.

If something like this was implemented, I think the most fair way would be: The game plays for x number of hours and then pauses for x number of hours which would be determined in the game set up. You would want to make the play/pause cycle not equal to 24 hrs so that the time that the game pauses would be different every day and that wouldn’t give any one person an epic advantage due to location. example would be, the game plays for 5 hours, then pauses for 2 hours, repeat or play for 10, pause for 5 etc.

As everyone would know what time the game is going to pause at, they can work around it to the best of their ability

The other way would be have everything set to the server’s clock and have the clock displayed on the home page. When setting up a game, you could put your pause factors in the set up and they would relate to “game’s time” eg. Every day from 10pm - 5am server time, the game pauses. from there everyone could do some quick maths to figure out their own time in relation to the game. If you don’t like the time to play and pause, go to a different game or set up your own.